The present invention is generally related to telephone systems and, more particularly, is related to repairing telephone systems.
Telephone service provides a lifeline for certain customers. For the elderly, people with disabilities, critical medical conditions, or other illnesses that limit mobility, the telephone serves as a manner in which to communicate with care providers outside of the home, such as health care personnel who respond in an emergency or otherwise. For example, an elderly person may depress a switch that utilizes the telephone line to place a call for emergency medical personnel or other health care personnel that come to the patient""s home to provide care. Others may utilize their telephone to contact family members when medications are required or for other reasons. Thus, by utilizing telephone service along with other specialized equipment, medical personnel, or others may be notified immediately when a person is in distress.
In certain telephone service areas, a telephone technician serves multiple functions. For example, the technician may install new services and repair outages for both business and residential customers. Currently, when a technician receives a repair request for both a business and residential customer, the business customer""s service is repaired before the residential customer. Normally, residential customers receive the same priority for telephone service restoration regardless of any special needs of certain residential customers. Customers may attempt to receive a higher priority by stating that they have a medical emergency when they call in their trouble report. Technicians use best efforts to honor these requests, however, preferential service is not guaranteed.
Unfortunately, experience has shown that at times, unscrupulous individuals call in a telephone repair request indicating they have a medical emergency when they do not. Without knowledge that no emergency condition exists, telephone company personnel may attempt to give effective preference to the unscrupulous individual by placing the unscrupulous individual""s repair request as a higher importance over other residential customers awaiting repair service. The dispatched technician may also not know that the repair request should not be handled on a different basis until arriving at the residence to make repairs. As a result of this deceptive repair request, other customers have had repair requests delayed.
Thus, a heretofore-unaddressed need exists for a solution that addresses the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.
The preferred embodiments of the present invention provide systems and methods for providing a medical dispatch system.
Briefly described, in architecture, one preferred embodiment of one system, among others, can be implemented as follows. A medical dispatch system comprises a dispatch processing system for processing service repair requests from customers and a work list generated by the dispatch processing system. The work list includes an indicator that a customer is under a medical maintenance plan. A technician processing system receives the work list from the dispatch processing system and displays service repair requests. Residential customers under the medical maintenance plan will receive a higher priority over residential customers not under a medical maintenance plan.
The preferred embodiment of the present invention can also be viewed as providing methods for providing a service. In this regard, one embodiment of such a method, among others, can be broadly summarized by the following steps: receiving a request from a customer for priority repair service; determining whether the customer is eligible to receive priority repair service based upon a medical maintenance plan; and dispatching a technician to the customer""s residence for a priority repair service when the customer qualifies under the medical maintenance plan.
Other systems, methods, features, and advantages of the present invention will be or become apparent to one with skill in the art upon examination of the following drawings and detailed description. It is intended that all such additional systems, methods, features, and advantages be included within this description, and be within the scope of the present invention.